local – Gigaomhttp://gigaom.com
The industry leader in emerging technology researchMon, 19 Mar 2018 12:00:46 +0000en-UShourly1Check out Nextdoor’s crowdsourced map for holiday lightshttp://gigaom.com/2014/12/12/check-out-nextdoors-crowdsourced-map-for-holiday-lights/
http://gigaom.com/2014/12/12/check-out-nextdoors-crowdsourced-map-for-holiday-lights/#commentsFri, 12 Dec 2014 20:50:27 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=900208If you wanted to know where all the best holiday spots are in town, this might be your year. Social networking application Nextdoor has reached out to its users in 47,000 neighborhoods to map their cities’ best lights and attractions.

Nextdoor is an application where neighbors can connect to each other, share safety warnings, plan local events, and sell items ala Craigslist. It has grown in popularity in the United States, and using census data, the company estimates that one in four neighborhoods are on it.

The holiday map is a feature of the app. Little icons tell you where to find the best Christmas tree lots, best light displays, charity locations, Santa sightings, and holiday events. Find your neighborhood here.

Neighborhoods join the Nextdoor network when someone applies to draw their neighborhood boundary (and gets a handful of people to sign up with them). Some areas are far more active on Nextdoor than others, so the strength of your holiday cheer map might vary. Here’s a snapshot of San Francisco’s:

San Francisco’s holiday cheer map on Nextdoor

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/12/12/check-out-nextdoors-crowdsourced-map-for-holiday-lights/feed/4Neighborhood social networking app Nextdoor’s new safety feature makes it a must-usehttp://gigaom.com/2014/09/30/neighborhood-social-networking-app-nextdoors-new-safety-feature-makes-it-a-must-use/
http://gigaom.com/2014/09/30/neighborhood-social-networking-app-nextdoors-new-safety-feature-makes-it-a-must-use/#commentsTue, 30 Sep 2014 17:04:54 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=877176Nextdoor, the private social network for neighborhoods, never seemed relevant for my millennial age demographic. It was the app version of a community board meeting or tea with your nosy neighbor, a place to learn about upcoming events, get recommendations on a plumber, hear the local chatter about the weird red car that’s been hanging around. Twenty-somethings in urban areas by-and-large don’t have kids, their lives don’t revolve around their home and they know their neighbors hardly, if at all. So even though I covered Nextdoor, I never felt compelled to actually become a user.

That changes today. Nextdoor has introduced a new element to its application that makes it a must-use network, even for the disinterested younger generations. It has started partnering with police and fire departments across the country — in 250 cities initially, with more to come — to use Nextdoor to communicate about emergencies and safety issues with local residents. Want a heads-up on a series of break-ins that have been happening in your area? The police precinct that oversees it can send information blasts, just to the neighborhoods that it impacts. Want to know whether it’s time for you to evacuate during a nearby brushfire — a major issue every fall in Southern California? Your local fire department might be using Nextdoor to get the word out. In fact, after the August earthquake, Napa — which was part of the 250 city test program — used Nextdoor to send out update information to residents.

In other words, the social network that initially connected neighbors to each other is now connecting vital city services to the residents themselves. Social networking has reached local government.

Of course, many local government branches have been using Twitter and Facebook for awhile to communicate with people. But these one size-fits-all platforms don’t work well for conveying detailed information that might only apply to people living on a few street blocks. Nextdoor is a whole different system. In order to join your neighborhood’s network you have to verify that you live there by — old school style — ordering a physical postcard sent to your home address. Various neighborhood newsfeeds are restricted, both for viewing and posting, to people who live there.

To integrate with police and fire departments, Nextdoor had to build an entirely separate application for government bodies to use. It didn’t want to violate the privacy of original Nextdoor neighbors, so it needed a way for these officials to post in the relevant networks without having access to view those networks’ content. Furthermore, it needed a way for government bodies to send targeted messages — specifically to particular Nextdoor neighborhoods, or to particular precincts or battalions or even to specific street coordinates. That way, they wouldn’t spam all Nextdoor users in a city.

And lastly, in order for this system to scale without massive manpower from Nextdoor, the site needed city onboarding to be an automatic process. Enter: Nextdoor for public agencies. It’s a self-serve site where police and fire chiefs can set up their department, determine who has access to messaging what neighborhoods, and send notifications to users in different areas of the city. Nextdoor built various prototypes over the span of 18 months with the 250 initial test cities. Now, it’s releasing its self-serve technology to the rest of the nation, so that even small provinces can use it.

It makes Nextdoor a far more significant use case, even if you aren’t a happy family of four who spends Saturdays barbecuing on your front porch. It’s a direct line to important, geographically relevant, safety-related communique from your local government. For those unfamiliar with the site, Nextdoor has been growing rapidly according to the vanity metrics the company released. When I wrote about it almost a year ago, roughly 23,000 neighborhood networks had been created (Nextdoor won’t allow a neighborhood to have its own network until ten people have confirmed they’re interested in joining). Now, that number is up to 43,000.

But the number that’s perhaps more relevant is engagement — that’s what will make or break this as a useful communication tool for local government. If people aren’t actually using their networks, police and fire departments aren’t going to waste their time sending out information blasts.

I would have guessed that people might create a Nextdoor network for their neighborhood and then stop using it if it didn’t provide enough value. That may be the case, but Nextdoor’s co-founder Sarah Leary told me 46 to 50 percent of users have created unique content on the site, like a post or a comment. “We push out a daily digest summary of the conversations, pointers back for people to engage back in the site,” Leary said. “The [digest] open rate is very high because as you can imagine if you see something in crime and safety you’ll want to know what’s going on.”

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/09/30/neighborhood-social-networking-app-nextdoors-new-safety-feature-makes-it-a-must-use/feed/1Journalism isn’t just about informing readers, it’s also about helping them take actionhttp://gigaom.com/2014/09/16/journalism-isnt-just-about-informing-readers-its-also-about-helping-them-take-action/
http://gigaom.com/2014/09/16/journalism-isnt-just-about-informing-readers-its-also-about-helping-them-take-action/#commentsTue, 16 Sep 2014 15:53:07 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=873541Most media outlets — both the traditional kind and the digital-first kind — still see themselves primarily as information engines, pulling in data and making sense of it and then telling readers or viewers about it. But there’s an equally important part of the job, especially when it comes to local journalism, and that is helping a community do something about the news events they are reading about.

There was a great example recently in Britain, as described by Trinity Mirror digital director David Higgerson on his blog. The Manchester Evening News was covering a fire at the historic Manchester Dogs Home, the kind of thing that local newspapers often do, and they started a live blog to post updates and photos of the action — again, a pretty typical thing for a newspaper or news website.

But then came something less typical: The newspaper decided to post a fund-raising link for those who wanted to contribute to the Home, for rebuilding and other costs. No doubt someone thought it would be a nice gesture, etc., but they probably didn’t expect what happened next — the paper, which had an initial target of five thousand pounds (about $8,000) raised more than $1.6 million in 24 hours.

As Higgerson notes in his post, there are a number of useful lessons here — and one is that if you are paying attention to what your community of readers are interested in, and what they care about, and you can give them a way of expressing that, it can be extremely powerful. Although it’s not clear how well Esquirea similar campaign has done with raising money for a fund in the name of murdered journalist James Foley, that was the idea behind its recent article-specific paywall experiment.

One of the skills that good journalists — particularly those who work in small communities — have always had is the ability to sense what issues are bubbling up in terms of interest in a community, and to connect with those readers who feel passionately about that topic.

Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis argues that this kind of skill is more important than ever now. At a time when there are more sources of information than there have ever been, and therefore more competition for the limited attention span of a news reader, connecting with a community and engaging with them as directly as possible (as opposed to just hoping they will redistribute your story to their friends) becomes a crucial factor in the survival of journalism as we know it.

Ironically perhaps, this is something that members of online communities like Reddit understand instinctively, and their ability to tap into and empower users who want to raise money for worthwhile causes can be seen in cases like the campaign for a Kenyan orphanage or a terminally ill cancer patient. Whether you agree with those specific goals isn’t really the point — the point is to recognize the value of that ability to connect with readers around an issue.

As Higgerson puts it, the newsroom of the future “needs to be full of people who spot communities forming on the spot, be it around an event or an issue. That could be outrage at the closure of a hospital, or it could be the reaction to a fire at a dogs home.” And those people need to do more than just tell readers about it — they need to help them do something about it.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2014/09/16/journalism-isnt-just-about-informing-readers-its-also-about-helping-them-take-action/feed/6Why Foursquare’s new feature makes a Google takeover offer even more likelyhttp://gigaom.com/2013/08/29/why-foursquares-new-feature-makes-a-google-takeover-offer-even-more-likely/
http://gigaom.com/2013/08/29/why-foursquares-new-feature-makes-a-google-takeover-offer-even-more-likely/#commentsFri, 30 Aug 2013 01:17:41 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=685327Foursquare, the location-based service that started with check-ins and badges and has expanded to include recommendations, launched a new feature Thursday that brings its goal of being the “location layer of the internet” even closer to reality — and the company also happens to be the subject of investment rumors as well, with Microsoft reportedly interested in taking a stake. But if anything, Foursquare’s new direction makes it even more obvious that Google is — or at least should be — the most likely home for the startup’s technology.

After five years of building its location service, Foursquare is getting a little long in the tooth for a startup, and the New York-based company has been the subject of some criticism for failing to show signs that it can monetize the service adequately — a wave of skepticism that seemed to peak when the company did a controversial debt issue in its last round of financing, which many observers took as a sign of desperation.

The value of four billion check-ins

More recently, however, Foursquare has bragged about how its advertising-related features are starting to pay off — the company says its advertising revenue was at $2 million last year and is apparently doubling every quarter — and about how its database of more than 4 billion local check-ins and recommendations is in demand, with developers and other services like Instagram building it into their services. “I think we’ve proven our business model,” chief revenue officer Steven Rosenblatt told Bloomberg.

According to Bloomberg, the company is currently in talks with a number of its debt-holders about converting their debt into equity, and is also discussing a potential investment with a number of large technology firms. Microsoft is said to be the front-runner, although Yahoo — whose new CEO, Marissa Mayer, allegedly wanted to acquire Foursquare when she was at Google — is also rumoured to be interested in possibly making a bid. As always, it’s possible that the Foursquare rumors may be a stalking horse, designed to either stir up potential interest in the company.

Regardless of how much truth there is to the Microsoft story, however, I think there is pretty compelling argument for why Google should step in and acquire the company — and the launch of its new local recommendation feature makes that even more obvious.

As my Gigaom colleague Lauren Hockenson has described in a post about the new feature, it essentially bypasses the Foursquare app and provides a real-time recommendation about nearby food or services as a notification on an Android (and eventually iOS) phone. Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley has said that this feature has always been part of his vision for the service, but the company has only been able to execute on that vision recently.

Foursquare is made for Google Now

When I heard Crowley talking about this potential feature earlier this year, my first thought was that it sounded like what Google is trying to do with Google Now — the mobile service that provides real-time notifications of things like traffic conditions, flight delays and a host of other data. Some say they find this kind of personal assistant feature creepy, but as I mentioned in an earlier post, I think it is incredibly useful. It may be the single most useful thing Google has ever launched, and that’s saying something.

Providing useful local recommendations about food and other services, the kind that Foursquare’s feature is designed to generate, seems like a natural extension of what Google Now does — and it helps explain why Marissa Mayer wanted to buy the company when she was in charge of local services at Google (ironically, Google acquired Crowley’s previous location-based startup, Dodgeball, in 2005 but eventually shut it down).

The fit becomes even more obvious when you consider that Google’s local recommendation features still need a lot of help, as competitor Jeremy Stoppelman of Yelp pointed out recently. The company has tried repeatedly to build local services under a bunch of a banners (anyone remember Latitude? Hotpot?) and has mostly failed to get any traction, but it’s clear that it wants to expand its local data in as many ways as possible — that’s part of the reason it spent $1.3 billion to buy social-traffic app Waze.

There’s no guarantee that Google is in the market for Foursquare, of course, or that the startup’s board and other shareholders would accept an offer. But there’s no doubt in my mind that the two would make a great combination. I for one would love to get Foursquare-style recommendations in my Google Now cards.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/08/29/why-foursquares-new-feature-makes-a-google-takeover-offer-even-more-likely/feed/5State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also getting inhttp://gigaom.com/2013/03/18/state-of-the-media-the-cracks-are-still-widening-but-some-light-is-also-getting-in/
http://gigaom.com/2013/03/18/state-of-the-media-the-cracks-are-still-widening-but-some-light-is-also-getting-in/#commentsMon, 18 Mar 2013 17:40:36 +0000http://paidcontent.org/?p=226110If you’ve been following the media industry over the past year, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you the waves of disruption continue to increase in both height and frequency — so the news that widespread cutbacks have caused dissatisfied readers to flee won’t come as much of a surprise. But while those waves have swamped some traditional players, other parts of the industry have been able to ride the tide, and non-traditional sources continue to play a growing role in how people get their news — although whether that is good or bad is still open for debate.

All of that and more is contained in the latest State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which was released on Monday morning (Note: We will be discussing many of these issues and more at our paidContent conference in New York on April 17). There’s a lot to take in, but here are what I believe to be some of the key takeaways:

The Bad News:

Cutbacks continue, and consumers are leaving: Close to one-third of U.S. adults say they have stopped using a news outlet because of dissatisfaction over the content — in other words, because they weren’t getting the news they wanted, or the news they expected to get. Survey respondents mentioned both fewer stories in general and less complete reporting, and while it’s impossible to know whether this phenomenon is related to the repeated rounds of cutbacks and job losses, it seems likely.

No one cares about the industry’s financial problems: One interesting aspect of Pew’s research is that only a small number of respondents were even aware of the financial woes of the media industry — and even worse, those who were the most aware of the situation were also the most likely to have stopped using a traditional news outlet. Are some readers choosing to desert what they see as a sinking journalistic ship? It certainly looks that way.

The disruption of advertising is accelerating: Although digital advertising rose by 17 percent last year, that was not nearly enough to make up for the ongoing decline of print advertising, Pew said. In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue — an even worse ratio than the already dismal 10-to-1 relationship that existed in 2011. And much of the growth in digital is benefiting Google (s goog) and Facebook (s fb).

It’s not just newspapers any more: The Pew research shows that local television is also being decimated by the disruption in both viewership and advertising revenue — to the point where viewers have started to notice the difference. Whether because of cutbacks or a desire to appeal to more viewers, Pew says that local TV news is also focusing more on sports and entertainment, and less time on crime and political coverage.

The Good News:

Demand for news is growing, not shrinking: Although it may be coming at the expense of some traditional players, there is clearly a large and growing appetite for news, since the top news sites saw traffic increase by 7 percent in 2012, according to Pew. And the impact of social media seems to be clearly positive, in the sense that those who have heard about news from friends and family through such channels show a stronger interest in finding out more.

Some outlets are having success with subscriptions: In the wake of the success of the New York Times paywall, many newspapers have erected their own subscription walls, and this is generating some reader-provided revenue that has helped to stanch the bleeding for some publishers (although even for the NYT and the Financial Times, this has not filled the gap entirely).

The sources are going direct: This is probably one of the most contentious aspects of the disruption in media — namely, the fact that social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms produce a “democratization of distribution” that allows everyone from celebrities to politicians, and even brands and companies themselves, to reach an audience directly. Is that good or bad for journalism? The debate on that question continues to rage.

New forms of advertising are emerging: This is another contentious topic in media — that is, the rise of what some choose to call “native advertising,” or sponsored content, and in some cases “brand journalism.” To detractors such as political blogger Andrew Sullivan it is ethically dubious, and to many traditional journalists such as former NYT executive editor Bill Keller it is a “slippery slope,” but new media entities like BuzzFeed and even The Atlantic are using it to some success.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As with any overview of the media business, there will be those who see this picture as a glass half-empty, and those who see it as a glass half-full — and perhaps a growing number who have completely lost interest in the glass because they are already getting their water elsewhere. As Emily Bell of Columbia and her fellow authors Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson pointed out in their recent report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” and author Clay Christensen noted in a recent interview at Harvard, upheaval is the order of the day in the media business and will likely be so for some time.

Shirky said in an essay in 2011 that we as a society actually need the media business to be chaotic, as unpleasant as that may be, because we literally don’t have any idea what the future of the industry will look like. Even now there are new entities being born, and new models being applied — like the Forbes “BrandVoice” model, or Sullivan’s direct-to-readers model — that could either be the savior of the industry or a dangerous distraction. If you like bumpy rides with an uncertain ending, the media industry is definitely the place for you.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2013/03/18/state-of-the-media-the-cracks-are-still-widening-but-some-light-is-also-getting-in/feed/3Path dives into search with a thematic approach to digginghttp://gigaom.com/2012/12/20/path-dives-into-search-with-a-thematic-approach-to-digging/
Thu, 20 Dec 2012 18:00:32 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=596162Suddenly it seems like everybody wants to get in on the search party — just this week, Facebook launched “Nearby” to help you find businesess near you, Yelp and Foursquare keep updating their products with new bells and whistles, and Twitter is letting you download your tweets for nostalgic personal searching or archiving. And Path, the self-described private social network, is jumping into the fray on Thursday with the launch of its own search product, which combines personal nostalgia with local recommendations all in one.

Path’s search function hinges around what looks like a normal search bar at the top of the screen, but when you tap it to enter a phrase, Path auto-suggests several ways to search: By person (you can hunt for all your memories that took place with a particular person), by place (you can look back and see moments from your favorite restaurant over time), by time (check out the music you’ve listened to at night, for instance), or by timeframe (everything that happened in April or last year.) You can also search for moments posted nearby, so if you’re looking for a coffee shop or sushi restaurant nearby, you can see where your friends have been in the area.

The search function on Path is definitely more personalized than what you’d find on Google, or even on Foursquare, under the assumption that the people you connect with on Path are your true, close friends (it’s limited to no more than 150 connections). So your results could be narrower but more targeted as a result. For the most part, Path’s search function feels closer to Timehop than Yelp, letting you discover moments from your past, rather than focusing on businesses that are necessarily nearby.

The biggest question in my mind when looking at the search function is whether users will immediately understand how to use some of its coolest features. Most of us are used to using the Gmail search bar to find keywords that we know appeared in the particular email we want, but Path’s search goes a little further than that.

A search for “weekend brunch” will turn up results for check-ins on weekends (the search engine knows that you mean posts on Saturday or Sunday), and at restaurants that serve brunch (by using Foursquare’s API to see which restaurants serve brunch food, even if the original post didn’t include the word “brunch.”) You can also search for “royal flush” to see moments that gathered all possible reactions from your Path friends (heart, smiley face, frown, etc.) It’s very cool, but not something users might immediately grasp. Although the suggested search terms can help with that.

And the success of the search bar is also very dependent on a user being a somewhat regular user of Path — it’s most interesting looking back at a wide variety of data from a long time period. The company is at about 5 million registered users, said Nate Johnson, the company’s VP of marketing, up from 3 million in April, but if you’ve only been posting on the network for a week, it probably wouldn’t seem as cool, although it would certainly work.

But I had a lot of fun searching through my Path moments from a year ago, and it’s an interesting step forward for the company in making social media check-ins and shares less chronological and more thematic to search through.

]]>Axel Springer buying local portal meinestadt.de to court local classifiedshttp://gigaom.com/2012/08/21/axel-springer-buying-local-portal-meinestadt-de-to-court-local-classifieds/
Tue, 21 Aug 2012 11:41:34 +0000http://paidcontent.org/?p=216696German news publisher and ad company Axel Springer’s landgrab in online advertising is continuing – this time, in towns and cities around the country.

Its recently-formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds joint venture is acquiring allesklar.com, the operator of 16-year-old meinestadt.de, a network of 337 local news and information sitelets underpinned by several categories of classified ads.

The company claims eight million monthly uniques and is being sold by its founding Stegger family (56.1 percent) and rival publisher Holtzbrink’s Digital Strategy unit (43.9 percent).

Although it publishes several regional, as well as national, newspapers, most of Springer’s online efforts have been at the nationwide level. Now it will gain a large local network through which to pipe meinestadt.de’s existing ads as well as those from Springer’s other sites.

Springer publishes one of the world’s most-read newspapers, Bild, but has also been piling heavily in to online-native classifieds, buying a host of such sites, including French property ads site SeLoger for a whopping €633 million and TotalJobs for £110 million. The publisher also operates autohaus24.de (auto classifieds), immonet.de (real estate) and buecher.de (e-tail).

Springer formed Axel Springer Digital Classifieds together with the investor General Atlantic in March when they acquired TotalJobs. The publisher owns 70 percent and the investor 30 percent of the unit.

]]>Today in Socialhttp://gigaom.com/2012/08/20/groupon-grief/
Mon, 20 Aug 2012 22:40:19 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?p=120683The Wall Street Journal underscores social commerce giant Groupon’s woes in a story that points out that Andreessen Horowitz thought the company’s IPO was premature, and has sold off its holdings. Fidelity might be starting to cash out, too. But Kleiner Perkins, Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price are still in or adding shares. Fortune takes the Journal to task for over-interpreting these “patterns,” or seeing them as a big negative on the whole sector. My own Weekly Update says Groupon’s headed for trouble if it thinks it can be an e-commerce technology supplier for local businesses. It would be better off selling them simpler marketing services.
]]>Google-Frommer’s deal shows travel and local are two sides of same coinhttp://gigaom.com/2012/08/13/google-frommers-deal-shows-travel-and-local-are-two-sides-of-same-coin/
http://gigaom.com/2012/08/13/google-frommers-deal-shows-travel-and-local-are-two-sides-of-same-coin/#commentsMon, 13 Aug 2012 19:44:05 +0000http://gigaom.com/?p=552477Google’s (s goog) acquisition of travel publisher Frommer‘s is being framed as another big push by the search giant to get into travel, following its purchase of ITA. But the deal also highlights how the worlds of travel and local are converging, with the two databases coming together as one big resource for consumers.

In announcing the deal, Google said it’s possible that Frommer’s will be combined with Zagat, the local review service that Google bought a year ago for $151 million. I expect the two services will do just that because that’s where the world is going: Ultimately, one person’s travel planning is another person’s local discovery. Google understands that and it wants to be the first place people turn to whether they’re looking to go around the block or around the world. We should expect to see more Frommer travel information show up in searches on Google and Google Maps, as Zagat content does now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a combined planning service that pulls the best of Zagat and Frommer’s at some point.

To be sure, local and travel converge more in big cities; there is less overlap in places that are off the path of tourists. But even in rural or lightly populated areas, there’s still a need for local information and that information could still fill a need for the occasional visitor.

Google is not alone in coming to this realization though it’s arguably the best positioned to straddle both the local and travel verticals. Social travel service GTrot reorganized around local discovery earlier this year because that’s how its users were using the site. Foursquare, which maintains a trove of local data, has gone the other way with its Explore tools for the web. Explore allow users to research places they haven’t been to before by using check-in data and other information from friends. Gowalla, before it sold to Facebook, also made a turn toward being a local guide that would appeal to both tourists and locals.

These examples suggest that we’re going to see more hybrid apps that combine travel and local information. The best travel services are increasingly focused on treating you like a local. And local services are becoming great resources for people looking to spend time in an unfamiliar city. I expect to see services like Foursquare, Yelp (s yelp) and others to build out their trip planning tools or combine their services with other travel services. And it’s likely that we’ll see more consolidation as companies from one vertical or the other tries to fill out the holes in their coverage. There is too much overlap between the two verticals not to.

The purchase of Frommer’s may also point up the limitations of crowd-sourced information. To get comprehensive local data, Google may be acknowledging that it needs more professional curation to provide up to date information. But it’s also possible that Google may move Frommer’s to more of a TripAdvisor crowd-sourced model, which is in keeping with Google’s approach to user generated content.

]]>http://gigaom.com/2012/08/13/google-frommers-deal-shows-travel-and-local-are-two-sides-of-same-coin/feed/2Today in Socialhttp://gigaom.com/2012/07/18/a-local-path-to-mobile/
Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:09:07 +0000http://pro.gigaom.com/?p=117711Turning circulars into instant local offers sounds like a clever idea, even if none of ShopLocal’s retail partners have signed on yet. Dealing with local merchants – even national chains – is a huge challenge in scale for any company. But it lends itself to partnerships for aggregation and distribution, as well as access to big existing audiences. At one point, Yahoo was developing decent relationships with newspapers – they could play a role in filling that scale problem, too. New CEO Marissa Mayer was managing a handful of local products at Google. She might see some local opportunity to juice up Yahoo’s pedestrian results. BIA/Kelsey has online capturing an 11 percent share of local ad dollars this year. Mobile advertising will take a long time to play out, but online local ads and content might be a path towards a mobile payoff. They have to be at least as attractive as trying to fix Flickr, check-ins or mobile browsers.
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